Friday, March 08, 2013

North African Jewish refugees in transit to Israel

This fascinating Jewish Agency video (despite its sub-optimal sound quality) is a rare example showing the flight of Jews from North Africa in the early 1960s.

The video is narrated by Woolf Perry, chairman of Keren Hayesod, a charity then tasked with raising funds for Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

The refugees arrive at Camp d'Arenas in Marseille, France where they are housed in aircraft-type hangars. A well-oil Jewish Agency machine kicks in to feed and house them and educate their children.

For most Jews, however, Camp d'Arenas is but a staging post on the journey to Israel. Compared to the overcrowded, rickety vessels that transported Holocaust survivors, these Jews from Morocco and Tunisia, simple tailors and silversmiths, travel in relative luxury as if on a pleasure cruise.

On arrival they join relatives already settled in Israel, or are sent to populate brand new housing in development towns.

Registration goes smoothly and the new arrivals are given some money to see them through their first few days in their new country. But the voiceover says ominously,"the problems start tomorrow."

3 comments:

This movie makes me think of the famous Israeli movie about the Jews from the ME arriving to Eretz and their lives in the Ma'abarot , Salah shabati (Slichah sheboati- Sorry that I came) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL4aU8duqFA

15333My mother's brothers and sister went to that camp mentioned.Before that they stayed in Marseille in one of the transit camps. Later they were transfered to Israel after an exhausting sea voyage and happy to see the land of their forefatherssultana

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In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)